This morning I noticed that our local independent ad paper (more ads than news) the Boise Weekly has an article on Google.  The nugget of relevance I got from the article was that there is a way to search books with Google.  After a little Googling to find the search I landed on print.google.com.  There are many books not yet indexed, but also many that are.  Next time you are looking for something you read in a book give it a try.  It is certainly faster than flipping through the pages manually.